Cooper

A village green in Elizabethan England, a man in a leather apron in a low-roofed workshop, the smell of freshly cut oak and the rhythmic tap of a hammer hooping iron bands around wooden staves — the cooper was one of the essential tradesmen of any pre-industrial economy, the maker of barrels, casks, buckets, and tubs, without whom wine, beer, salted fish, gunpowder, and almost anything else that needed to travel could not have moved at all. The Old English cuper and the Middle Dutch cuper both fed into the English Cooper, and the surname spread wherever English speakers settled, becoming one of the most common occupational surnames in the United Kingdom and the United States.

James Fenimore Cooper, the early-nineteenth-century New York novelist who wrote The Last of the Mohicans and the rest of the Leatherstocking Tales, gave it an American literary pedigree; Gary Cooper, the Montana-born star of High Noon and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, gave it a movie-star drawl; Anderson Cooper continues the tradition on cable news. American parents began converting the surname to a first name in the late twentieth century. Cooper entered the SSA top 100 in 2005, the top 50 by 2014, and currently sits at rank fifty.

Famous bearers also include Cooper Manning (Peyton and Eli's older brother), Cooper Hoffman (Philip Seymour Hoffman's son and the actor in Licorice Pizza), Bradley Cooper (surname-as-name), and a quietly increasing wave of unisex Coopers. Two friendly syllables — COO-per — with a double-O at the opening that rounds the mouth into something like a smile. Pairs cleanly with both modern and classical middles (Cooper James, Cooper Mae, Cooper Wren, Cooper Cash). Nicknames are scarce: Coop for the most common. Unpretentious, unisex-leaning, solidly handcrafted in feel.